1. Field of the Invention
The present invention broadly relates to deburring of component parts having flat and/or curved configurations, such as aircraft fuselage panels or the like, and, more particularly, is concerned with an automated contour deburring apparatus wherein the profiles of component parts of varying sizes and shapes are sensed and accommodated without the necessity for human intervention.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Deburring of metal and plastic parts must be accomplished for two principal reasons: (1) material handling problems, and (2) part misalignment problems in tooling setups. Manual handling of parts with sharp, exposed edges, for instance, in transfer between stages of a manufacturing operation, presents a safety hazard. Also, burrs of sufficient size and/or quantity can cause misalignment in tooling fixtures. This condition can cause part scrappage and costly rework.
To avoid these problems, manual deburring is undertaken often and at considerable cost. One major disadvantage of manual deburring is that frequently repetitive setups must be made in order to accomplish deburring of a part. This consumes an inordinate amount of time. For example, a ninety-degree formed part may have to be set up a half dozen times before the deburring operation is completed. In the aircraft industry, especially, by virtue of the large number of parts required to construct an aircraft, manual deburring of parts is a significantly large cost factor.
Although factories have been equipped with various types of deburring machines for some time, many parts still have to be deburred by hand because their thickness, size or other factors make them unsuitable for the mechanized techniques. Deburring machines in current use are mainly of the specialty type, being limited to a single part having a uniform thickness and flat configuration or to a family of geometrically-similar parts. No machinery having general application presently exists.
Therefore, the need exists for a safe, automated deburring technique having broad application to parts of widely ranging contours and configurations wherein the necessity for manual human intervention is minimized, if not eliminated entirely.